Half a century later, the
paintings of Adolf Hitler are still a federal case

By Marc Fisher

THE best of the paintings shows a war-torn streetscape --
a lamppost leaning away from a shrapnel-nicked brick
building. The background reveals the facade of a gutted
church, its purpose burned away. There is no one on the
street; life has been chased, bombed, swept from this
Belgian village where the soldier-artist found such
devastation. The artist was good enough to make his living
at this for some years. But he realized he was not going to
make his mark as a painter. He changed careers and became
far more successful in another line of work. His name was
Adolf Hitler.

The United States of America claims ownership of these
four Hitler watercolors. So does an art collector in Texas
who bought the rights to the paintings from the children of
Hitler's personal photographer. A lawsuit over the
watercolors has been slouching through federal courts in
Texas and Washington for 18 years. There are lawyers who
spent much of their careers on the case, retired and still
come back to the office to work on it. Some of the most
important witnesses have died while the case drags on.
Billy Price, the Texas collector who first filed suit
against the government, has long since sold off his
collection of Hitler art and World War II memorabilia --
someone who didn't like the idea of collecting Hitler's
paintings put a bullet into Price's office one day, and that
was enough for him.

But the lawyers push on, and so do their clients -- Price
and the descendants of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's
friend and photographer. And all around the country, there
is a busy and lucrative trade in Hitler's artwork -- mostly
watercolors, a few oils, lots of hand-painted postcards
(some of which were actually sent and include birthday
salutations and wish-you-were-here vacation greetings on the
flip side), and a few 1-by-2-inch miniatures that reveal an
obsession with architectural detail.

Fifty-seven
years after the Nazi dictator killed himself in his bunker
under the Berlin that Soviet troops were torching in a
vengeful, righteous rage, the fascination with Hitler shows
few signs of abating. It is a worldwide obsession with a man
who has become a universal symbol of hate and the human
capacity for evil. But Hitler is also a particularly
American interest. German filmmakers and writers
occasionally take him on, and artists around the globe use
his story and image to make points about violence and
tolerance, religion and hate. But only in this country are
there cable channels that serve him up around the clock,
only here does he remain a constant in entertainment and
literature, only here does the market in his artwork remain
brisk and busy.

Those who work to keep the horror of the Holocaust and
the crimes of Hitler fresh and meaningful fear that the
Fuehrer and symbols of him -- the black-and-white footage,
endlessly repeated; the mustache, forever imitated; the wild
gestures and barking rhetoric, ceaselessly mocked -- will
devolve into a crass commercialization that sweeps away
memories of the horror. These people worry that Hitler's art
might be used to promote new bouts of extremism and hate --
which is exactly why Hitler's art is banned in Germany, as
are swastikas, Nazi regalia and even Mein
Kampf. Fear of resurgent nationalism still drives policy
in Hitler's homeland, even after half a century of
democracy.

IN this country, there are no such taboos: Hitler is out in
the open, a staple of Hollywood and novels, a magnet for
collectors of military memorabilia, and yet an almost
mundane presence. He is as daily as Dan Rather or
Britney Spears, and nearly as easy to spoof. In this
country, beyond the imagination or comprehension of Germans,
there's a longstanding, thriving market in everything Nazi.
Collections run the gamut: legitimate auction houses, back
tables at flea markets, private stashes in
climate-controlled, high-security additions to fancy
suburban houses, and, of course, eBay, which, on one recent
day, offered 1,125 Hitler-related items, from postage stamps
to autographs to cuff links. Billy Price's privately
published book on Hitler's art sells for $99 and comes with
a promise that it is "completely nonpolitical and only
concerns itself with the art of Adolf Hitler." There are a
couple of prominent Hitler art collectors in Britain and
elsewhere (Florence's Uffizi Gallery owns 18 Hitlers, and
several Japanese collectors have a few Hitlers, though most
Japanese concentrate on Nazi uniforms, which reenactors like
to wear), but most of the best collections are in this
country.

"We understand that some artifacts are sensitive to some
people, and we offer these specimens with this in mind,"
says a policy statement on the Web site of Manion's
International Auction, purveyor of Hitler bronze wall
plaques ($39), a swastika-adorned paper lantern ($75), a
Hitler wall tapestry (asking $390; no bids), and an original
oil painting of the Fuehrer, signed by the artist (asking
$2,000).

But prices jump markedly if the offering is something
from Hitler's own hand, if it is a vision from the
dictator's mind, a glimpse into the artist who might have
been, into the reality that might have followed, if only the
young painter had risen above his art school rejection and
persisted in the career he had chosen as a boy, the path
that had so outraged his father, the identity that Hitler
would cling to throughout his life. Adolf Hitler,
artist.

What does it mean now, half a century later, to own a
Hitler, to hang it in a place of honor in your front hall,
to secure it in an annex to your house, to want it so badly
that you fight the government for decades for the right to
call it your own? What does it say about you, about the
culture in which you live, and about what Hitler is and will
be?

From a 1937 book of Adolf Hitler aquarelles, published by
a Nazi Party publishing house: Hitler "is at once the First
Fuehrer and the First Artist of our Reich."

IN a corner house on a quiet street in Bowie, Charles
SnyderJr., a retired Air Force major (Korea,
Vietnam), and his business partner, Chase Haddock,
man the mice on a bank of computers that are always on,
always scouring eBay for bids and buys. Snyder, dressed in
shorts and madras plaid shirt, is surrounded by a
bewildering forest of clutter: floor-to-ceiling tchotchkes;
precarious piles of books and maps; plastic tubs and cruddy
old suitcases, all packed with photos, magazine covers,
original war documents; shelves stuffed three-deep with
military uniforms, swords, guns, decorations from the French
Revolution to Korea; entire newspaper photo archives; and,
tucked away in crevices known only to the proprietor, 16
works of art by Hitler. It's all for sale, all priced to
move. At the moment, Snyder has 1,600 items up for auction
on eBay.

Hitler once said he painted more than 1,000 pieces while
living in Vienna from 1909 to 1914. A U.S. government report
once put Hitler's total output at closer to 3,000 works. No
good accounting of the pieces has been made. Collectors
around the world consider any group of 20 or more Hitlers to
be a fair-size collection. Snyder has bought and sold more
than 100 pieces, at prices mostly in the $5,000 to $10,000
range.

The Hitler business, like the rest of Snyder's Treasure
Trove, as it's known to its customers, was once a very
public, social sort of endeavor -- road shows, a regular
annual circuit around the country. EBay put an end to all
that. No reason to leave the house anymore. "We get almost a
million hits a month," announces Snyder, a muscular, correct
man with close-cropped white hair and a mustache. "It's
saved our lives." Forget the trucks -- Snyder's tools of the
trade now are ergonomic neck cushions and anti-repetitive
strain injury wrist straps.

Snyder has been a collector since 1962. "It's a disease
and you can't stop," he says. At 70, he is, like many
collectors, old enough to remember the war. It was indeed
World War II stuff that first got him hooked on the
collectibles biz -- uniforms, weapons, Eva Braun's
tea service, Nazi autographs, swastika cuff links, Hitler's
silver, Hitler's desk ornaments, and then, finally, Hitler's
art. At one point a few years ago, Snyder owned 40 Hitlers.
He's down to 11 watercolors, a bunch of postcards and one
large oil, a dark portrait of a cathedral under a mottled
brown sky. It is signed "Adolf Hitler" and dated 1936.

"He was kind of busy then," Snyder says. The oil hangs
just inside his front door, next to autographed photos of
Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Don't be
distracted by the homey look: Everything is for sale. He
wants $35,000 for the oil.

ABOUT seven years ago, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant who
was involved in the looting of Hitler's Bavarian hideaway
sold Snyder his collection of Hitleriana. It was a mother
lode from the fatherland. D.C. Watts and others in
the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment had entered
Berchtesgaden with the first occupation troops in May 1945.
The initial looting had already ended, but Watts soon
learned of a network of tunnels leading to Hitler's country
house, the Berghof. There he found the grail -- the storage
rooms where Hitler's belongings were protected from Allied
bombing.

American soldiers carried out their war booty by the
trunkful. Watts snared hundreds of pieces of silverware,
thousands of documents and more than 30 original Hitler
paintings. "We won, so it's ours," is Snyder's explanation.
"That's why guys bring stuff back. It's, 'Gee, Mom, I was
there.' "

Snyder buys from anyone; he once picked up a Hitler from
Albert Speer, the Fuehrer's architect. Snyder paid
$500 for a Hitler sketch for a German pavilion at the
proposed 1942 World's Fair. The major later sold it for
$1,000. Business.

Snyder has pencil sketches of Linz, Austria, Hitler's
home town. He has the postcards. Snyder doesn't especially
like Hitler's painting. In his catalogue of his collection,
he writes of the Hitler works,

"People and animals are out of proportion,
poorly articulated, and vastly out of scale with the
backgrounds. Figures are rendered with wanton disregard
for anatomy or accurate animation."

All of which has nothing to do with Snyder's regard for
the value of his Hitlers. They're merchandise. Most of his
customers see it the same way: One of Snyder's friends liked
one Hitler so much, he scanned it into his computer to use
as a screen saver. But other customers don't care what the
painting looks like as long as it's a Hitler, and still
others just don't talk about why they want what they want.
And Snyder never asks.

There
are a few customers who make it clear they think of Hitler
as a hero. "We just overlook that," Snyder says. "You get
the arrows from the flanks and you overlook it. This
neo-Nazi movement is built up beyond what it is. All these
kooks. I'm not a real historian about Hitler, but over 40
years you absorb all this. And still you don't understand
him. You can't understand a dictator. They live within
themselves."

Snyder won't identify most of his customers, but
euthanasia advocate Jack Kevorkian, "Dr. Death," was
one. Had a nice little Hitler collection there for a while.
For what it's worth.

Snyder doesn't spend a lot of time trying to figure out
Hitler the artist or Hitler the genocidal dictator. He has
product to move. "Our job is to place these things with
collectors who will really appreciate them," he says. Nor is
he ever creeped out by having all this Hitler stuff all over
his house, even in the bedroom. "You get used to creepiness,
being a warrior. Which is unfortunate, but you do. I used to
have mannequins upstairs, World War I aviators, and it just
got too weird, my wife didn't like it, so I took them
downstairs." Where they stare at him all day.

He will say this: "There is more of a fascination with
bad guys than with good guys." Churchill and
Eisenhower painted, too. "You don't see much of their
work, and there's not much demand." But the demand for
Hitler art shows no sign of waning. It's only when he starts
going through old photographs of the war that Snyder relates
all this to his own years in the military. "The further away
you get from a terrible experience, the better it seems," he
says suddenly. And he tears up.